An Interview and a Raffle With Ed Kurst

Today, we’re interviewing the author, to get to Know a little more about his writing process, and what it’s like publishing your first book! Read on for some great conversation with Ed Kurst.

What was your experience like publishing The Know: Preservation? Did you self-publish, use a small house publisher, or try to pitch a big publishing house?
I read several books and a lot of articles about the various publishing choices. After all that research, I couldn’t decide but was fortunate to have a family friend who was a content editor. She then recommended a firm to do the copy-editing, and they recommended a website designer, and the book cover artist worked there as well. Lo and behold they also specialized in providing publicity for books, so I self-published.

The cover of your book is unique, and lets the reader’s imagination begin to bubble. Who did you work with to create the cover, and what was that experience like?
Creating the cover was a collaborative process with the cover artist, Mallory Rock. She requested answers to a long list of questions. My wife and I also did a lot of on-line research to locate images we believed depicted Traveling as I described it in the book.

Mallory took all this information and produced a couple of covers. They weren’t what I had in mind so I provided some more specific input about the theme and color palette I was looking for plus how I would prefer the title to be oriented.

The final cover didn’t depict the actual act of Traveling, but I did feel it evoked the feeling of time travel. I love it and am tickled you liked it as well!

Now that your book is out, what are your next steps as an author – can we expect more books in the near future?The Know: Preservation is the first book in a trilogy. The second is The Know: Evolution, and the third will be The Know: Salvation. These should be published over the next few years. John Preston will remain the lead character, and there will be both old and new villains and supporting cast. John and the world are in for a rocky ride to salvation!

I also have about fifty pages and an outline completed for a book called The Fae. It will be filled with magical creatures, both good and evil, that live in the current day world but are known by only a few.

Time for a few questions about your first book! The Know: Preservation uses the real names and places of some leaders in our world, for example, Putin and the ‘Family America’. Would you say that your book presents a possible alternate history for the world we live in today, albeit with a number of science fiction elements like The Know, ELAC and CACH?
Yes, it is an alternate time-line world. But as the book occurs around the year 2030, I’d like to think it is also juuuust vaguely possible, you know, if there had been people with the Know secretly directing events for the last seventy thousand years!

And, ummm… if you know that the Family America exists today, uh… could you give me their phone number? I’d like to talk to them.

Tell us a bit more about ELAC and CACH, where did you get the idea for these two plot elements?
I’ll try not to get into the weeds, but I am an engineer…

I wanted to create a science fiction basis that would allow all sorts of possibilities to present themselves, so the traditional limitations that are still imposed by modern quantum physics needed to be removed. Access to sub-Planck space was required.

I took the furthest theoretical predictions for accelerator technology and extrapolated them to their endpoints. This resulted in the maximum colliding-particle energy of one million tera-volts achieved by the ELAC. To do this would require materials not currently known today and component assemblies in the angstrom range. Even at this level, ELAC would be many, many orders of magnitude shy of what would be needed to approach the Planck realm.

The CACH, where the “coalescence point” occurs, was a necessary meld of extrapolated science with pure science fiction. It’s where multiple million-teravolt fields overlap to create the exponentially more intense energy effect required to breach the Planck energy threshold.

Okay, I did get in the weeds … some.

Last question – and it’s a fun one! If your book had a favorite color, vehicle, and place to travel, what would it be?
Definitely, the favorite color of my book would be electric blue: the color of the energy fields when traveling through Zpace and the color of Stacey’s eyes.

Hmmm… vehicle… That would be another thing all together. I’m just too personally in love with the red 1967 Corvette L88 Coup. Now if I only had four million dollars lying around in a shoe-box somewhere…

My book would definitely want to spend more time with Tril. It would be fascinating to talk to and live through every detail and rendition of the future she manipulated in order to save the world from disaster.

About the Book

John Preston set aside the easy bullet that would end his certain lingering death. He now Knew too much. His mind had just returned from a wild ride tens of thousands of years into the past where he witnessed three primitive humans divining a path to save humankind from a global fiery catastrophe. What John now Knew might cure him but could also require he shred the very fabric of time and space.

John’s quest for answers will thrust him into the lead role to confront the Consortium, a cabal of eight families with the power to Know the future and the past. Guided by John’s latent Know ability and a 70,000 year old prophecy, he sets out on a path for his own salvation. Success will mean life, failure…a cruel doom for all humankind.

Preservation is the first book in the Know Trilogy which wraps a new theory of space-time, humankind’s evolution, millennia old conspiracies, and imminent global destruction around a broken man’s redemption, an evil man’s reckoning and a driven woman’s unique destiny.

About the Author

Ed Kurst’s life as a child was a nostalgic bit of Americana, with two married parents, one sibling, and a pet beagle. They didn’t even lock their cars. The only thing missing was the proverbial white picket fence, but their neighbor did build a split rail one from seasoned logs.

As a kid, Ed frequented a neighborhood library, accessed by a spiral staircase to the second floor of an old brick building. It was a wondrous place to a curious child. Hardback novels were stacked from floor to ceiling and nestled in every nook and cranny of the library’s dusty shelves. Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Asimov were his first and favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. In between reading these classics, he devoured every book about dinosaurs and astrophysics his young mind could comprehend.

These early literary influences eventually led him to study a pre-med, engineering curriculum with a special focus on the psychology and physiology of the human brain. Eager to get out in the real world, and not spend six more years in school, he decided to pursue the engineering side of his interests. He didn’t completely abandon his calling for medicine. But getting an EMT qualification and occasionally riding an ambulance at night seemed to satisfy that urge.

Ed Kurst’s engineering vocation led him to live and work in five European countries and several places in the United States. During the last decade of a varied career, he settled in the US Gulf Coast and specialized in leading diverse technical teams to implement new technology and develop mega engineering projects. Once retired, he turned his attention to other pursuits.
One fateful month, about eight years ago, he was reading all he could about the CERN particle accelerator, the migration of homo sapiens out of Africa, the demise of the Neanderthals, and epigenetics. He also was reacquainting himself with his favorite fantasy and science fiction authors. Voilà, The Know trilogy was born! The first book—The Know: Preservation—is due for publication in 2016. The second—The Know: Evolution—is in draft form and scheduled for 2017. The last in the series—The Know: Salvation—should follow in 2018. And, another novel—The Fae—is in progress as well. It’s packed full of strange and wonderful fantasy creatures that live and love and scheme right under our very noses!

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

About Mark Gardner

Mark Gardner lives in northern Arizona with his wife, three children and a pair of spoiled dogs. Mark holds a degrees in Computer Systems and Applications and Applied Human Behavior.
View all posts by Mark Gardner